Small Gods (2 page)

Brutha listened.

Brother Nhumrod was the novice master, but he wasn’t
the
novice master. He was only master of the group that included Brutha. There were others. Possibly someone in the Citadel knew how many there were. There was someone somewhere whose job it was to know
everything
.

The Citadel occupied the whole of the heart of the city of Kom, in the lands between the deserts of Klatch and the plains and jungles of Howondaland. It extended for miles, its temples, churches, schools, dormitories, gardens, and towers growing into and around one another in a way that suggested a million termites all trying to build their mounds at the same time.

When the sun rose the reflection of the doors of the central Temple blazed like fire. They were bronze, and a hundred feet tall. On them, in letters of gold set in lead, were the Commandments. There were five hundred and twelve so far, and doubtless the next prophet would add his share.

The sun’s reflected glow shone down and across the tens of thousands of the strong-in-faith who labored below for the greater glory of the Great God Om.

Probably no one
did
know how many of them there were. Some things have a way of going critical. Certainly there was only one Cenobiarch, the Superior Iam. That was certain. And six Archpriests. And thirty lesser Iams. And hundreds of bishops, deacons, subdeacons, and priests. And novices like rats in a grain store. And craftsmen, and bull breeders, and torturers, and Vestigial Virgins…

No matter what your skills, there was a place for you in the Citadel.

And if your skill lay in asking the wrong kinds of
questions or losing the righteous kind of wars, the place might just be the furnaces of purity, or the Quisition’s pits of justice.

A place for everyone. And everyone in their place.

The sun beat down on the temple garden.

The Great God Om tried to stay in the shade of a melon vine. He was probably safe here, here inside these walls and with the prayer towers all around, but you couldn’t be too careful. He’d been lucky once, but it was asking too much to expect to be lucky again.

The trouble with being a god is that you’ve got no one to pray to.

He crawled forward purposefully towards the old man shoveling muck until, after much exertion, he judged himself to be within earshot.

He spake thusly: “Hey, you!”

There was no answer. There was not even any suggestion that anything had been heard.

Om lost his temper and turned Lu-Tze into a lowly worm in the deepest cesspit of hell, and then got even more angry when the old man went on peacefully shoveling.

“The devils of infinity fill your living bones with sulphur!” he screamed.

This did not make a great deal of difference.

“Deaf old bugger,” muttered the Great God Om.

Or perhaps there was someone who
did
know all there was to be known about the Citadel. There’s always someone who collects knowledge, not because of a love of the stuff but in the same way that a magpie collects glitter or a caddis fly collects little bits of twigs and rock.
And there’s always someone who has to do all those things that need to be done but which other people would rather not do or, even, acknowledge existed.

The third thing the people noticed about Vorbis was his height. He was well over six feet tall, but stick-thin, like a normal proportioned person modeled in clay by a child and then rolled out.

The second thing that people noticed about Vorbis was his eyes. His ancestors had come from one of the deep desert tribes that had evolved the peculiar trait of having dark eyes—not just dark of pupil, but almost black of eyeball. It made it very hard to tell where he was looking. It was as if he had sunglasses on under his skin.

But the first thing they noticed was his skull.

Deacon Vorbis was bald by design. Most of the Church’s ministers, as soon as they were ordained, cultivated long hair and beards that you could lose a goat in. But Vorbis shaved all over. He gleamed. And lack of hair seemed to add to his power. He didn’t menace. He never threatened. He just gave everyone the feeling that his personal space radiated several meters from his body, and that anyone approaching Vorbis was intruding on something important. Superiors fifty years his senior felt apologetic about interrupting whatever it was he was thinking about.

It was almost impossible to know what he was thinking about and no one ever asked. The most obvious reason for this was that Vorbis was the head of the Quisition, whose job it was to do all those things that needed to be done and which other people would rather not do.

You do not ask people like that what they are thinking about in case they turn around very slowly and say “You.”

The highest post that could be held in the Quisition was that of deacon, a rule instituted hundreds of years ago to prevent this branch of the Church becoming too big for its boots.
*
But with a mind like his, everyone said, he could easily be an archpriest by now, or even an Iam.

Vorbis didn’t worry about that kind of trivia. Vorbis knew his destiny. Hadn’t the God himself told him?

“There,” said Brother Nhumrod, patting Brutha on the shoulder. “I’m sure you will see things clearer now.”

Brutha felt that a specific reply was expected.

“Yes, master,” he said. “I’m sure I shall.”

“—shall. It is your holy duty to resist the voices at all times,” said Nhumrod, still patting.

“Yes, master. I will. Especially if they tell me to do any of the things you mentioned.”

“—mentioned. Good. Good. And if you hear them again, what will you do? Mmm?”

“Come and tell you,” said Brutha, dutifully.

“—tell you. Good. Good. That’s what I like to hear,” said Nhumrod. “That’s what I tell all my boys. Remember that I’m always here to deal with any little problems that may be bothering you.”

“Yes, master. Shall I go back to the garden now?”

“—now. I think so. I think so. And no more voices, d’you hear?” Nhumrod waved a finger of his nonpatting hand. A cheek puckered.

“Yes, master.”

“What were you doing in the garden?”

“Hoeing the melons, master,” said Brutha.

“Melons? Ah. Melons,” said Nhumrod slowly.

“Melons. Melons. Well, that goes some way toward explaining things, of course.”

An eyelid flickered madly.

It wasn’t just the Great God that spoke to Vorbis, in the confines of his head.
Everyone
spoke to an exquisitor, sooner or later. It was just a matter of stamina.

Vorbis didn’t often go down to watch the inquisitors at work these days. Exquisitors didn’t have to. He sent down instructions, he received reports. But special circumstances merited his special attention.

It has to be said…there was little to laugh at in the cellar of the Quisition. Not if you had a normal sense of humor. There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!!

But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven.

The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.

They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same.

And there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he’d send back a crudely colored woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risqué message on the
back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale “Pop” Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight
obols
for his retirement present and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he’d always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were shorthanded.

And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.

Currently he was sitting alongside the bench on which lay what was still, technically, the trembling body of Brother Sasho, formerly his secretary.

He looked up at the duty inquisitor, who nodded. Vorbis leaned over the chained secretary.

“What were their names?” he repeated.

“…don’t know…”

“I know you gave them copies of my correspondence, Sasho. They are treacherous heretics who will spend eternity in the hells. Will you join them?”

“…don’t know names…”

“I trusted you, Sasho. You spied on me. You betrayed the Church.”

“…no names…”

“Truth is surcease from pain, Sasho. Tell me.”

“…truth…”

Vorbis sighed. And then he saw one of Sasho’s fingers curling and uncurling under the manacles. Beckoning.

“Yes?”

He leaned closer over the body.

Sasho opened his one remaining eye.

“…truth…”

“Yes?”

“…The Turtle Moves…”

Vorbis sat back, his expression unchanged. His expression seldom changed unless he wanted it to. The inquisitor watched him in terror.

“I see,” said Vorbis. He stood up, and nodded at the inquisitor.

“How long has he been down here?”

“Two days, lord.”

“And you can keep him alive for—?”

“Perhaps two days more, lord.”

“Do so. Do so. It is, after all,” said Vorbis, “our duty to preserve life for as long as possible. Is it not?”

The inquisitor gave him the nervous smile of one in the presence of a superior whose merest word could see him manacled on a bench.

“Er…yes, lord.”

“Heresy and lies everywhere,” Vorbis sighed. “And now I shall have to find another secretary. It is too vexing.”

After twenty minutes Brutha relaxed. The siren voices of sensuous evil seemed to have gone away.

He got on with the melons. He felt capable of understanding melons. Melons seemed a lot more comprehensible than most things.

“Hey, you!”

Brutha straightened up.

“I do not hear you, oh foul succubus,” he said.

“Oh yes you do, boy. Now, what I want you to do is—”

“I’ve got my fingers in my ears!”

“Suits you. Suits you. Makes you look like a vase. Now—”

“I’m humming a tune! I’m humming a tune!”

Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha’s voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. Choral singing was compulsory for novitiates, but after much petitioning by Brother Preptil a special dispensation had been made for Brutha. The sight of his big round face screwed up in the effort to please was bad enough, but what was worse was listening to his voice, which was certainly powerful and full of intent conviction, swinging backward and forward across the tune without ever quite hitting it.

He got Extra Melons instead.

Up in the prayer towers a flock of crows took off in a hurry.

After a full chorus of
He is Trampling the Unrighteous with Hooves of Hot Iron
Brutha unplugged his ears and risked a quick listen.

Apart from the distant protests of the crows, there was silence.

It worked. Put your trust in the God, they said. And he always had. As far back as he could remember.

He picked up his hoe and turned back, in relief, to the vines.

The hoe’s blade was about to hit the ground when Brutha saw the tortoise.

It was small and basically yellow and covered with dust. Its shell was badly chipped. It had one beady eye—the other had fallen to one of the thousands of dangers that attend any slow-moving creature which lives an inch from the ground.

He looked around. The gardens were well inside the temple complex, and surrounded by high walls.

“How did you get in here, little creature?” he said. “Did you fly?”

The tortoise stared monoptically at him. Brutha felt a bit homesick. There had been plenty of tortoises in the sandy hills back home.

“I could give you some lettuce,” said Brutha. “But I don’t think tortoises are allowed in the gardens. Aren’t you vermin?”

The tortoise continued to stare. Practically nothing can stare like a tortoise.

Brutha felt obliged to do something.

“There’s grapes,” he said. “Probably it’s not sinful to give you one grape. How would you like a grape, little tortoise?”

“How would you like to be an abomination in the nethermost pit of chaos?” said the tortoise.

The crows, who had fled to the outer walls, took off again to a rendering of
The Way of the Infidel Is A Nest Of Thorns
.

Brutha opened his eyes and took his fingers out of his ears again.

The tortoise said, “I’m still here.”

Brutha hesitated. It dawned on him, very slowly, that demons and succubi didn’t turn up looking like small old tortoises. There wouldn’t be much point. Even Brother Nhumrod would have to agree that when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise.

“I didn’t know tortoises could talk,” he said.

“They can’t,” said the tortoise. “Read my lips.”

Brutha looked closer.

“You haven’t got lips,” he said.

“No, nor proper vocal cords,” agreed the tortoise. “I’m doing it straight into your head, do you understand?”

“Gosh!”

“You
do
understand, don’t you?”

“No.”

The tortoise rolled its eye.

“I should have known. Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to waste time on gardeners. Go and fetch the top man, right now.”